| [4] | Our tr. of the programme is taken from the Protokoll or shorthand report of the party meeting at Stuttgart, 1898, to which it is prefixed. |
CHAPTER X
ANARCHISM
It is agreed that anarchism as a form of socialism originated with Proudhon; but the theory owes its fuller development chiefly to Russian agitators. The great apostle of the system in its most characteristic stage was Michael Bakunin.
Bakunin[[1]] belonged to the highest Russian aristocracy and was born at Torshok, in the government of Twer, in 1814. In due time he entered the army as an officer of artillery, which was a select department of the service. While serving in Poland, however, he was so painfully impressed with the horrors which he saw exercised under Russian despotic rule, that he resigned his commission and entered on a life of study. In 1847 he visited Paris, and met Proudhon, who had a decisive influence on his opinions.
The revolutionary movement of 1848 gave the first opportunity for the activity of Bakunin as agitator. He was particularly concerned in the rising at Dresden in 1849. But the hands of the reactionary Governments and of their police were heavy on the baffled enthusiasts of the revolution. Bakunin had a full share of their bitter experience. As he tells us himself in his work on Mazzini, he was for nearly eight years confined in various fortresses of Saxony, Austria, and Russia, and was then exiled for life to Siberia. Fortunately, Muravieff, Governor of Siberia, was a relative, who allowed him considerable freedom and other indulgences. After four years of exile, Bakunin effected his escape, and through the greatest hardships made his way to California, and thence to London in 1860.
Bakunin thus passed in prison and in exile the dreary years of European reaction which followed the revolutionary period of 1848. When he returned to London he found that the forward movement had again begun. It was a time of promise for his own country after the accession of Alexander II. to the throne. In the Kolokol he assisted Herzen to rouse his countrymen and prepare them for a new era; but the impatient temperament of Bakunin could not be satisfied with the comparatively moderate counsels followed by his friend. The latter years of his life he spent, chiefly in Switzerland, as the energetic advocate of international anarchism. In 1869 he founded the Social Democratic Alliance, which, however, dissolved in the same year, and entered the main International. He attempted a rising at Lyons in September 1870, soon after the fall of the Second Empire, but with no success whatever.
At the Hague Congress of the International he was outvoted and expelled by the Marx party. His activity in later years was much impaired by ill-health. He died at Berne in 1876.
In their preface to Bakunin’s work, God and the State, his friends Cafiero and Elisée Reclus afford us some interesting glimpses of the personality of the agitator. ‘Friends and enemies know that the man was great by his thinking power, his force of will, and his persistent energy; they know also what lofty disdain he felt for fortune, rank, glory, and all the miserable prizes which the majority of men are base enough to covet. A Russian gentleman belonging to the highest nobility of the empire, he was one of the first to enter in that proud association of the revolted, who knew to detach themselves from the traditions, the prejudices, the interests of race and class—to contemn their own happiness. With them he fought the hard battle of life, aggravated by prison, by exile, by all the dangers, and all the bitterness which devoted men have to undergo in their troubled existence.’
They then go on to say how ‘in Russia among the students, in Germany among the insurgents of Dresden, in Siberia among his brethren in exile, in America, in England, in France, in Switzerland, in Italy, among men of goodwill, his direct influence has been considerable. The originality of his ideas, his picturesque and fiery eloquence, his untiring zeal in propaganda, supported by the natural majesty of his appearance, and by his strong vitality, gained an entrance for him in all the groups of revolutionary socialists, and his activity left deep traces even among those who, after having welcomed it, rejected it because of differences in aim or method.’ But it was mainly by the voluminous correspondence with the revolutionary world, in which he spent whole nights, that his activity was to be explained. His published writings were the smallest part of his work. His most important treatise, God and the State, was only a fragment. ‘My life itself is a fragment,’ he said to those who criticised his writings.
Nothing can be clearer or more frank and comprehensive in its destructiveness than the socialism of Bakunin. It is revolutionary socialism based on materialism, and aiming at the destruction of external authority by every available means. He rejects all the ideal systems in every name and shape, from the idea of God downwards; and he rejects every form of external authority, whether emanating from the will of a Sovereign or from universal suffrage. ‘The liberty of man,’ he says in his Dieu et l’Etat, ‘consists solely in this, that he obey the laws of Nature, because he has himself recognised them as such, and not because they have been imposed upon him externally by any foreign will whatsoever, human or divine, collective or individual.’ In this way will the whole problem of freedom be solved: that natural laws be ascertained by scientific discovery, and the knowledge of them be universally diffused among the masses. Natural laws being thus recognised by every man for himself, he cannot but obey them, for they are the laws also of his own nature; and the need for political organisation, administration, and legislation will at once disappear.